I’ve tried the new Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 a few times now and there’s an issue with the screen I just can’t tolerate.

I mentioned it in an earlier post:

The Super AMOLED screen is killer. But I have to point out that when viewed at a sharp angle, whites tend to become bluish.

Well, it’s not just at sharp angles that pure white begins to have a blue tint!

I noticed this during another fondle of the Nook edition of the tablet. I downloaded a sample of an eBook. That gave me a pure white background for reading. And if I wasn’t just about perfectly head-on to the display with my eyes, it would shift to an increasingly-blue color.

Maybe most people can live with that, but it irritates the hell out of me.

The Insignia Flex Elite 7.85 is less than half the price of Samsung, but white stays white regardless of the viewing angle.

I was warned about the Samsung screen in earlier Comments.

John:

According to Wikipedia these tablets have pentile displays. I absolutely despise pentile displays, so these two are dead to me. Shame, they do look nice.

Filipp:

Hm I am sure they have their awful PenTile display there. That means that it is not actually retina screen as it is much less sharp. And it will cost up to 3 times more than standard retina chinese tablets.

And in that he raises an issue I hadn’t even considered nor tried: The appearance of the screen with reduced backlighting. According to him — and his illustrations prove it — the screen will look like low-resolution crap.

Samsung, on the left. That blue!! It’s even worse on the Galaxy Tab S2 8.0.

Since reading will be the primary use for my tablet, I’m not sure I can live with the blue-shifting of the Samsung.

I’m beginning to consider just saying the hell with it all and getting the iPad Mini 4 — it has the monstrous power of the iPad Air 2. I wouldn’t have the microSD card slot I need, so I’d have to investigate offline storage via Bluetooth or WiFi.

Or I can also say the hell with it and go for the cheap-ass Insignia Flex Elite 7.85 with its regrettable battery life.

Or maybe the mythical Nexus 8 from Colorfly and Google will happen after all. But would it have a microSD card slot? Nexus branded devices tend not to.

I haven’t made any final decision yet, but since others sometimes read these posts for their own buying decisions, I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention.

Same-day update: It turns out the new Mini 4 does not have the guts of the iPad Air 2. It’ll use the A8 CPU, not the A8x CPU of the Air 2. Which means I’ll have to go through an entire new round of Google Books PDF tests on the beast.

11 responses to “Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 Super AMOLED Annoys Me”

Previous AMOLED Galaxy Phones had several screen “Modes”. For example, on the Galaxy S6, “Les Numériques” found that if you select “Basic Mode”, the screen became the best calibrated screen on the market, ahead of those from Apple. Every smartphone since the S3 had such a mode (not default setting) that disable adaptative color enhancements.

Update: “Les Numériques” have a review of the S2 Tablet. There is a “Basic Mode”, with it the colorimetry becomes very good (delta E of 2,2) and white temperature is very good (6 630 K, tiny bit too hot).

According to Apple, the A8X is 1.4 times faster while the A8 is 1.3 times faster than the A7. For graphics, the difference is greater. So you are right, we need to test again what this means in practice for reading PDFs. Also we need too see if the anti-reflection of the Mini 4 and Air 2 are equal. Needless to say, a local file manager is missing. Not to mention the stylus of the “Pro”.

I’m not really bothered by color reproduction or viewing angles, but after comparing the S2 9.7 with the original Tab S I’m very disappointed in the new screen, the text is not sharp at all. Samsung really has messed it up by decreasing the dpi and using Pentile on these tablets. All I can think of is they’re trying to cut costs and they’re hoping most people won’t notice.

It’s a shame because i’ve always wanted a 4:3 tablet for reading (not a fan of the iPad) but if the screen is actually worse than last year’s model then what’s the point. I really like Amoled and I really appreciate not having the backlight there when using my tablet at night but 264 dpi is not high enough for a pentile screen.